I recently found time to get graphite up and running on an older amd64 box I had laying around. For the time being, everything is pretty much stock, running as a fastcgi app within OpenBSD's native httpd, with collectd daemons running on the machines I'm monitoring (killing two birds with one stone, replacing smokeping with collectd's ping plugin at strategic points on the network). I've liked it so much that it has replaced both Cacti and smokeping that have been my go-tos for many years.

So on to the question! Being completely new to graphite, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by the number of third party dashboards, backends, alerting systems, etc... Is anyone here running graphite, and if so, what add-ons have you found useful?

I don't use it, and never have, but you might be interested in a book about Graphite by Jason Dixon. He's an emeritus OpenBSD Developer. It's in the process of being published, with an eBook available now.